Did the title of this blog have anything to do with you clicking the link to read it?

According to recent statistics human kind generated more information in 2011 that had been generated from the beginning of time until the end of 2010. That’s staggering. But no surprise. With so many blogs (around 300 million), Facebook updates, tweets, self published books – we are doing a lot of communicating.

This means a lot of noise and we suffer not so much from information overload as we do from filter failure. We have to learn to filter out what is not important, not relevant so we see and interact with that which is of value to us.

For obvious reasons I follow and interact with people and organisations in the social media/social business space. It’s both exciting and cluttered. There seems to be a social media guru around every corner. In fact as far back as 2009 there were over 17,000 people on Linked In who had “Social Media Guru” somewhere in their work title. With so many trying to attract attention and stand out as someone of influence the most common blog post titles are along the lines of “10 reasons why….” or “5 reasons you should…”

I read somewhere that such titles appear to get the most reads and interaction. If that is true I understand why it used so much. It doesn’t mean, however, that it has not become tiresome since most of these turn out to unhelpful and just add to the noise I need to filter my way through.

But since it’s going to get people to read my blog I need to have the title. If the title got you here and you were disappointed, my apologies. At least you share my frustration.

Change in this industry is so mercurial that what works today often doesn’t work next week. Perhaps is time to leave the 5 reasons, the 10 examples and the 12 ideas behind.